This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
It’s just been another very busy Monday for Emma, a wife, mother of two and book agent in London. She’s trying to figure out how to avert a crisis at work, she really should quit a volunteer position, her daughter and son are arguing and keeping some strange secret. The biggest issue of the day, however, is that it’s the anniversary of the day she and her husband met. For years, they’ve had the tradition of writing each other letters. And she’s now on her second year in a row of forgetting/not having time to write a letter.
The day has not gone well.
After they argue, her husband goes out for a quick walk with the dog. She hears the squeal of brakes, and she runs outside to see him dead on the road. It’s a nightmare; her heart is breaking.
But then as she wakes up in the morning not knowing how to face life without Dan, Emma is startled to see him right next to her in bed. Soon, she figures out it’s Monday again.
She goes through the day and hopes that she can save him this time: having a do-over is a miracle! But he still dies that evening. On and on, Emma relives that horrible Monday. And every single time, Dan dies.
This book is patterned after Groundhog Day (and has some similarities to One Day). But it’s not fun or light. It’s a fairly grueling 300 pages of a woman experiencing the toughest day of her life for what is essentially months to her. What makes it harder to read is that it seems obvious she has a few lessons to learn, a few changes to make, and as obvious as they seem to readers, she is just not getting the message. For MONTHS, over and over and over. It makes her somewhat unlikable. The book includes the whole set of letters her husband writes her over the years, and they are sweet, but the frustration of how Emma takes a very long time to make important changes dilutes the sweetness of the love story. For a book like this to work (one that uses a “stolen,” familiar plot device that worked really well in the original), the characters and the story must be really excellent. I felt it needed more light moments to give me a break from the constant grimness.
I appreciated the way it wrapped up; I knew one particular piece of the plot had to be important, but I didn’t know how. And I thought it was great. But that just didn’t make up for how bleak most of the book was for me. If you’re in the mood for a heartbreaking story, however, Maybe Next Time is for you.
Rated: High. Profanity includes 40 uses of strong language, 35 instances of moderate profanity, 10 uses of mild language, and 110 instances of the name of Deity in vain. There are also about 15 uses of British profanity. Sexual content is fairly minimal; references to a married couple having sex and just one scene with very brief amount of detail. Violence includes several occasions in which a person is killed in a car crash; some blood is mentioned.
Click here to purchase your copy of Maybe Next Time on Amazon.
